Fresh Air Fiend (11 page)

Fleeing to the ocean doesn't help. Rowing my boat off Cape Cod, I am constantly harassed by speedboats. What is it about recreational motorboaters (as opposed to fishermen in motorboats) that makes them such a callow, aggressive breed? Something to do, perhaps, with the fact that boozing and boating often go together, and so many of the boaters are teenagers, not old enough to drive a car. A rowboat is no match for one of these foaming monsters that goes slapping past. I have lost count of the number of times such boats have almost swamped me. I can only believe that it is deliberate. Is it possible the boaters don't know they throw up a five-foot wall of water in their wake?

The smaller and frailer-seeming the boat, the greater the threat. In my kayak I am frequently yelled at, barracked, hectored, and mocked. Kids on Jet Skis are unspeakable. They sideswipe, they strafe, and they leave you in no doubt that these machines ("personal watercraft") are just the latest in a long line of technological atrocities unleashed on a peaceable world by Japanese manufacturers.

Anecdotal evidence overwhelmingly indicates that anyone who jogs or rows or cycles in the open, in this free country, is asking for some kind of trouble. As I've said, it ranges from an obscene gesture to an attempt at murder. This is worth examining as a social phenomenon, partly because we take for granted that it will happen, but also because it is a specifically American occurrence. I have cycled and rowed in other countries, and I have been stared at, but not harassed. The aggression in the American reaction often has a comic veneer, the bullying, joshing sort which characterizes a certain variety of our humor and which makes it indistinguishable from sadism. The origin of this kind of heckling might be summed up in the old-time shriek "Get a horse!" but it is much more serious than it seems, and I believe it constitutes an actual threat.

In the most common situation, the threat comes from more than one person—rarely is it one-on-one. The group of people in the car or speedboat, the phalanx of jet skiers, are nearly always male. Their response appears to be a reflex of violent envy directed against an isolated and vulnerable person—the skimpily clothed jogger, the madly balancing paddler, the panting cyclist. It is like an objection to the assertive freedom and health implicit in these pastimes, and it might be bound up with the suspicion—in a minority of cases a well-founded suspicion—that someone who exercises this way so publicly is showing off.

Yet the response is so lacking in tolerance that I cannot help but think that at its source is a wild anger, a fear and frustration, at being faced by a free spirit, someone who cannot be controlled. And the instance where the foolish person plows by in a speedboat and lets loose a loud and stupid remark might be explained by his sudden realization that for once in his life he is stronger and faster and apparently superior. Such a person would deny he is a criminal, and yet his reaction is the impulse behind most crime: the eagerness to commit an act of violence because the victim seems weak, ludicrous, exposed, and naked—victims nearly always seem that way. Crime is a monstrous sort of unfairness, and so it is always in the criminal's interest to pick on an especially weak or supine target.

Why does this, as far as I know, mostly happen in America? What is it that rouses us and incites us against people pursuing innocent and healthful objectives? Perhaps that is part of the answer: the very innocence and robustness implicit in jogging or cycling might themselves be a kind of provocation. As for the shouting, well, Americans tend to think out loud—you get perfect strangers yapping at each other all over. In our strenuously verbal and competitive culture, great stress is placed on self-assertion. The irony is that people jogging, paddling, or cycling are exhibiting in a non-aggressive way those same demonstrative characteristics. And as I mentioned, it is more than likely, too, that joggers and other fresh air fiends are motivated to a certain extent by impure enthusiasm. There are many who could be described as hotshots, seeming to invite comment. It is hard to see a person cantering on a horse without imagining that person thinking,
I am on a horse and you're not.

Even so, that is no reason for the person to be violently harassed. We are described as a nation that respects the rights of individuals, but I have seldom found this to be the rule. Eccentricity—even the healthy eccentricity in these one-person pastimes—is commonly perceived as a threat. I suspect that we are more deeply conservative and threatened by novelty than we imagine. Generally, we don't want to believe that we are, and we cling to a mythical notion of ourselves as tolerant and liberal-minded. I think our tolerance is mostly posturing. It is unpleasant to contemplate, but this swift impulse to harry the jogger or to swamp the small boater seems like a specifically American trait, one of our worst, arising from the pack mentality of our competitiveness, our vocal masculinity, our contempt for eccentricity, and our self-justifying humor in which the butt of the joke is always a weak victim.

I wonder whether it is possible to widen this argument and make it political. So much in American foreign policy is related to implied threat or the wish to control. I think our irrational reaction to any number of countries that have chosen an unconventional path to political or economic fulfillment is an example of this envious bullying. We are always talking about freedom as though we valued it. If we truly valued it and practiced it, we would probably talk about it less often instead of treating it like a mantra in the hope of overcoming our baser instincts.

I
SET OUT
one morning in my kayak, facing the open sea, intending to paddle thirty-five miles or so from Falmouth on Cape Cod to the island of Nantucket, stopping at Martha's Vineyard on the way. I felt waterproof, buoyant, and portable, with a sleeping bag and food for four days. It was a lovely morning, but I was already in a sunny frame of mind knowing that in order to paddle to Nantucket and camp on the way I would have to trespass and break the law.

For me the best sort of travel always involves a degree of trespass. The risk is both a challenge and an invitation. Selling adventure seems to be a theme in the travel industry, and trips have becomes trophies. Wealthy people pay big money to be dragged up Everest on ropes, or go whitewater rafting down the Ganges, or risk death for photo opportunities with gorillas in war-ravaged Rwanda. The element of hardship in this sort of travel has been either downplayed or eliminated—still, the risk factor is so great that these ambitious tourists are often injured or even die on such trips.

Adventure travel seems to imply a far-off destination, but a nearby destination can be scarier, for no place is more frightening than one near home that everyone has warned you against. You can dismiss ignorant opinion—"Africa's dangerous!" or "India's dirty!" or "China's crowded!"—but when someone you know well, speaking of somewhere near home, says, "Don't go there," it sounds like the voice of experience. This does not usually deter me, however. The idea is to devise a way of going, as when in 1853 Sir Richard Burton learned colloquial Arabic, grew a beard, darkened his skin, and gave his name as Mirza Abdullah and his occupation as "dervish," in order to take the haj as a born Muslim to the holy city of Mecca, closed to infidels. When the Chinese told me a place was forbidden—a word they love and use often—I merely smiled and thought of ways to disobey.

Warnings applied to the ocean surrounding Cape Cod sound especially dire. But if you took all advice and heeded all warnings and obeyed the opinion of scare mongers, you would never go anywhere. Most people who hand out advice are incapable of putting themselves in your shoes: they fear for their own safety, and impose this fear on you; and when they are speaking of a place with a bad reputation near home, they can be bullies. There is no terror like the terror of what is nearby. The vaguely familiar can be worse than the unknown, because any number of witnesses have supplied spurious detail, the hideous certainty of specific fatal features, and the lurking idea that if you go, you will either die or be horribly disappointed.

Such opposition can be stimulating, perversely inspiring. Everybody and his oceangoing brother told me not to try to paddle to Nantucket. I listened to them and then, that morning, I rose before dawn, got the latest weather report for Cape Cod and the islands, and prepared my kayak for the trip I was determined to make.

Cape Cod is not one little jigjog of land. It is vast, composed of all the seas around it, the sounds, the channels, the fetch and chop of the tide races, the sandbars, the islands so small they appear only twice a day at low tide and have scarcely enough room to serve as a platform for a sea gull's feet.

The sea is a place, too, and it is not empty either. It contains distinct locations, shoals, rocks, buoys, cans, and nuns—and wrecks that stick up with the prominent authority of church steeples or bare ruined choirs. The angler facing south from the jetty at Hyannisport sees just an expanse of blue water, yet there are nearly as many features on the nautical chart of Nantucket Sound as there are on the adjacent map of Hyannis. These are not only the sites of nameless wrecks and gongs and bells, but memorable and resonant names. Crossing to the Vineyard from Falmouth, you pass L'Hommedieu Shoal, Hedge Fence (a long narrow shoal), and Squash Meadow, and if you cross from there to Edgartown, you pass many named rocks. The current—its changing speed and direction—is another serious consideration, and the water depths range from a few inches to more than a hundred feet. But it is misleading to think that because the sea is a place, it is safe and hospitable. In his book
Cape Cod,
Thoreau wrote, "The ocean is a wilderness," and he went on to say that it is "wilder than a Bengal jungle, and fuller of monsters."

In bad weather you can't see the Vineyard from the Cape shore, and even on the clearest day you can't see Nantucket. The challenge to the paddler is more than open water; it is also a swift and changeable current, a strong prevailing wind, and scattered shoals that send up a steep chop of confused waves. Nantucket Sound has a long history of being a ship swallower, one of the most crowded graveyards of any stretch of ocean. It was not uncommon in the nineteenth century for a whaling ship to leave Nantucket and spend two years sailing around the world, crossing the southern ocean, going around the Horn and through the Roaring Forties, only to be smashed to bits on the rocks or shallows at Nantucket, within sight of the harbor.

Nonetheless, I was thrilled by the warnings. For a number of years I had wanted to cross the sound, head for Nantucket through open water, and get there in one piece, in my own craft, by using dead reckoning—a chart, a compass, and vectoring on the incoming tide by my estimated speed. I knew it wasn't simple. Nantucket lies far below the horizon, and only its "lume"—the flaring halo of its harbor light—shows at night from the nearest part of the Vineyard.

Whenever I spoke about paddling there, people tried to put me off. They were sailors with boats that drew five feet of water, or else fellows with speedboats who had never been out of sight of land, or tourists and partygoers who knew the route only from the long, cold ferry ride from Hyannis.

My dream of paddling through the wilderness of open water was the dream of an Eagle Scout (I was in Troop 24). It was also the dream of someone who had had enough of foreign travel for a while, of places that were crowded and thoroughly tame, of the tedium and sleep deprivation of a long plane journey, and of the yappy turbulence of other travelers. I had recently been to Tibet, Polynesia, northern Scotland, and the southern island of New Zealand; I had not been alone. Tourists have penetrated to the farthest, wildest parts of the world. An article I would prefer not to write, about the spread of tourists, might be titled "They're Everywhere."

They are not in the Muskeget Channel. I knew I would not run into anyone on the way. I had never heard of anyone making this crossing, or even wanting to. Small craft warnings are frequent. The
Eldridge Tide and Pilot Table
shows a four-and-a-half-knot current running in some places in the Muskeget Channel, and with a strong wind and tide it would be much greater than that. To cap it all, it is illegal to camp on any of the outer islands. It was dangerous, it was unlawful, it was foolhardy, it was forbidden.

Catnip, I thought. Who wouldn't choose to paddle a kayak to Nantucket?

 

I left Green Pond Harbor in East Falmouth, paddling my folding Klepper kayak, the nearest thing there is to an Inuit kayak.

An Asian man and woman were fishing from the breakwater. Perhaps to amuse the woman, the man shrieked at me, "You'll never make it!"

I considered this remark and kept paddling into the slop of the sound. Among the Klepper's many virtues are its seaworthiness and stability, its lightness, its ample storage space, and its portability—it can be taken apart in about fifteen minutes and stuffed into two bags. It can't be rolled over easily, and if you fall out, you can climb back in, which is almost impossible to do in other kayaks.

It was one of those beautiful mornings in early September, after Labor Day, when the Cape has a bright, vacant look—no traffic, no pedestrians, no swimmers, and only fishing boats on the water. The sky was clear, the wind was light; a low dusting of haze prevented me from seeing the Vineyard distinctly. My plan was to head for East Chop lighthouse, continue on that shore for a few miles, and have lunch on the beach below Oak Bluffs. My afternoon plan would have to depend on the wind and weather, but the outlook was good.

Crossing Nantucket Sound is the Cape sailor's first psychological barrier. I had rowed and sailed across it before I paddled it, but paddling was the simplest of the three. The sound can be dangerous to vessels of any size. On August 20, 1992, I was crossing from Green Pond to Oak Bluffs and saw a passenger liner anchored off East Chop. I paddled toward it, and the rising tide, flowing east, gave the illusion that the ship was moving slowly west. In fact, I was being tugged away from the anchored liner. Approaching it, I saw that its main deck was as tall as a twelve-story building, and rounding its stern I saw
QUEEN ELIZABETH II — SOUTHAMPTON
. Passengers were being taken ashore to Oak Bluffs, a mile and a half away, in whale boats. I paddled to the gangway and struck up a conversation with the mate.